Ian Hacking, CC, Ph.D.,
FRSC, FBA (born February 18, 1936 in Vancouver) is a
Canadian university professor and philosopher, specializing
in the philosophy of science.
He has undergraduate degrees from the University of British Columbia
(1956) and the University of Cambridge (1958), where he was a student at
Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Hacking also took his Ph.D. at Cambridge (1962),
under the direction of Casimir Lewy, a former student of Wittgenstein's.
He taught as an assistant, then associate professor at UBC, spending some time teaching at the Makerere University College in Uganda. He became a lecturer at
Cambridge in 1969 before shifting to Stanford in 1974 to teach in
behavioural science. After teaching for several years at Stanford University, he
taught for a brief time in Germany(1982-1983). He became a professor of philosophy at the University of
Toronto in 1983 and a full university professor there in 1991,
while also lecturing at Princeton College and Cambridge on and off. From 2000 to 2006, he was the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at
the Collège de France.
Hacking is known for bringing a historical approach to the philosophy of science and was one of the important members of the
"Stanford School" in philosophy of science, a group that also included John Dupre, Nancy Cartwright, and Peter Galison. Despite his strong interest in historical revolutions in science (following the work of
Thomas Kuhn), Hacking defends a realism about science, "entity realism", albeit only on pragmatic grounds: the electron is real because human beings use it to
make things happen. This form of realism encourages a realistic stance towards the entities postulated by mature sciences but
skepticism towards scientific laws. In his later work (from 1990 onward), his focus has shifted from the physical sciences to
psychology, partly under the influence of the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault was an
influence as early as The Emergence of Probability (1975), in which Hacking proposed that the modern schism between
subjective or personalist probability, and the long-run frequency interpretation, emerged in the early modern era as an
epistemological "break" involving two incompatible models of uncertainty and chance. Foucault's approach to knowledge systems and
power is also reflected in Hacking's work on the social construction of psychiatric disorders and institutional roles for
statistical reasoning in the 19th century.
In 2002, he was awarded the first Killam Prize for the Humanities, Canada's
most distinguished award for outstanding career achievements. In 2004, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Selected works
Hacking's works have been translated into several languages.
- The Logic of Statistical Inference (1965)
- The Emergence of Probability (1975)
- Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (1975)
- Representing and Intervening (1983)
- The Taming of Chance (1990)
- Scientific Revolutions (1990)
- Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995)
-
(1998)
- The Social Construction of What? (1999)
- An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001)
- Historical Ontology (2002)
External links
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